Button leads Turkish Friday Practice 2

Jenson Button led the way in the second Friday practice session of the Turkish Grand Prix weekend. Behind him were the two Red Bulls of Webber and Vettel, before reliability got in the way of both cars again.

Before the session began, Sebastian Vettel had a water pipe change, although he suffered a loss of water pressure near the end of FP2, and drove slowly back to the pits. Meanwhile, Mark Webber slowed as he accelerated away from Turn 2, and smoke appeared from his engine. He rolled to a halt soon after. Despite this, Webber and Vettel were 2nd and 3rd respectively.

Lewis Hamilton was 4th, and almost 4 tenths slower than Button. Fernando Alonso was behind Hamilton, followed by the two Mercedes drivers of Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher. Again, the two Renault drivers of Kubica and Petrov were close, getting 8th and 9th. Felipe Massa rounded off the top 10.

Adrian Sutil once again trounced his team-mate by an entire second to take 11th place. Nico Hulkenberg put in a good performance to get 12th, and the same goes for Kamui Kobayashi who was 13th. Behind them were Pedro de la Rosa, Sebastien Buemi, Vitantonio Liuzzi and Rubens Barrichello, with Jaime Alguersuari again the slowest of the midfield.

While Heikki Kovalainen was again considerably the fastest of the new teams, in 19th, his team-mate Trulli was not beside him. Instead, Lucas di Grassi split the two Lotus cars t0 finish 20th, with Jarno 21st. Timo Glock was 22nd, followed by the HRTs of Senna and Chandhok.

Track temperatures reached up to 50 degrees during this session. Many drivers were caught out by Turn 8, such as Felipe Massa, Vitantonio Liuzzi, Kamui Kobayashi, Vitaly Petrov and Karun Chandhok. Massa’s spin ruined one of his sets of tyres, which affected his pace in this session.